TraceRoot

Empowering population health professionals with the information, tools, collaborations and confidence to be able to convince the decision makers to make the case that investing in social determinants of health.

Duration

10 weeks, 2016

My role

UX Designer & Researcher

Location

Ann Arbor, MI

Introduction

In the summer of 2016, I worked as UX design intern at the Innovation Studio at School of Public Health, University of Michigan The Innovation Studio transforms the research of the faculty into scalable and sustainable ventures with the capacity to develop and deliver desirable, viable and feasible public health solutions.

In this internship, I worked on a project under the supervision of Prof. Sharon Kardia and Dr. Jodyn Platt to tackle the challenge of the health disparities in population health domain. Over the course of 10 weeks, the project team had interviewed more than 80 people from various stakeholder groups, synthesized the insights from the interviews, ideated based on our research findings, prototyped potential solutions, and iterated based on feedback received from the user testings.

Design Challenge

The situation of the problem

Most people in the health field recognize that the diseases and health outcomes observed in society are symptoms directly related to disparities. Despite this recognition, organizations focused on health dedicate almost all of their resources to treating those symptoms instead of working on the root causes.

The complication of the problem

These connections between social conditions and health outcomes exist but are not used on a mass scale to make the case for improving overall health. Professionals in this field generally do have the skills, time, or resources to credibly make those studies available at a local level or explain the potential benefits of their proposed actions in a way that will convince decision makers of the value of those programs.

Our solution

This solution aims at empowering population health professionals with the information, tools, collaborations and confidence to be able to convince the decision makers to make the case that investing in social determinants of health would be an investment in their community’s overall health.

How it works?

The synthesize process played a critical role in generating insights from all the interviews we finished. Basically, the process starts from combining all of our notes (mostly physical) from the different team members into a single digital document, which already filtered the repeated information and added complementary parts.

Design Process

3

teammembers

10

Weeks

72

Interviews

29

Insights

3

Iterations

Contextual Interview

Based on the stakeholder map and the background studies, we broke down each stakeholder group into potential interviewee list. These interviewees cover most of our stakeholder map, they come from different states across the country, very diverse backgrounds, but share a common goal of improving the community health.The contacts of the interviewee candidates are acquired from our the local community, university networks, as well as general online research.

From Interviews to Insights

The synthesize process played a critical role in generating insights from all the interviews we finished. Basically, the process starts from combining all of our notes (mostly physical) from the different team members into a single digital document, which already filtered the repeated information and added complementary parts. By using this method during the interview phase, we accumulated a database which comprises all the key information from various interviewees. The next step was printing out these documents, cutting them into pieces and reorganizing them on the wall according to specific categories, such as setting the data needs, data gathering and identifying appropriate interventions. In each category, the information were also divide into three sections which are needs, assumptions and questions in order to inform the design team what are their pain points, what are the things we assumed they have and what do we need to clarify with the interviewees in the next round interviews.

Insight Document (Need/Assumption/Question)

This browser does not support PDFs. Please download the PDF to view it: Download PDF

Framing the "HMW" question

After generated the insights document, the team started another round of brainstorming to come up with several How Might We questions which aim to narrow down our research scope and identify the common interests of the team. We clustered these individual HMW questions into five groups and prioritized them by voting. The final integrated version of HMW question became the general topic which provided a frame to the following ideation phase.

Personas

According to the HWM question, our target people are the officers of community health organizations, community health officers in non-profit health systems and the directors of public health departments. These personas helped us empathetically understand the situation / pain points from their perspectives.

Jasper Moor

Director, Community Health Organization

Michelle Curtis

Community Benefit Officer, Health System

Nicolas Hardy

Director, County department of public health

User Story

As a Community Benefit Officer of a non-profit hospital, I want to have a tool which can establish an evidence-based relationship between health conditions and social determinants of health. So that I can convince the decision makers to make a case to invest in the social determinants of health in order to improve the overall health of the community.

Design Criteria

hese design criteria were established from the faculties' research interests / findings and our previous insights document within the specific user senerios. They are the first priorities which considered in the next conceptualization and prototyping phase.

1

Studies directly link social determinants of health to the health outcomes. It is possible to extrapolate the evidence-based relationships to other geographies;

2

Public health professionals need to be able to speak the language of business to justify the value of their work;

3

Individuals hoping to make the case about the value of working beyond the bounds of the health care system to address health problems need a tool to convince others of the value in making those investments;

4

Community organizations are actively seeking collaboration with health systems based on the connection between the community effort and the medical mission of the hospitals.

Finalized Concept

Concept Brainstorming

User Flow Draft

User Case Presentation

This browser does not support PDFs. Please download the PDF to view it: Download PDF

Final Prototype

Started form a structual sketch of the concept, we developed the first prototype and evaluated it by a series of user testing interviews in order to collect non-biased feedbacks. The Information from the interviews were synthesized and incorporated into the next iterations of the design. By the final prototype was created, we have conducted four rounds of iterations until user issues have been reduced to an acceptable level. The following images show the user interaction flow in TraceRoot and the user interfaces of the main features. Please check the final protoype link here